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Well now, the Lord’s been good. I finally stitched the last square onto that "Memory Quilt" for my grandson, David. It’s made from scraps of his daddy’s old shirts, some of my mama’s dresses, and even a bit of his baby blanket. Took me a good while to get it all right, piecing together all those bits of our lives. But seeing it all come together, all those colors and memories woven in… mm-mm, it just warms my heart something fierce. He’s going to love it, I just know it. It’s more than just stitches, honey, it’s love. ❤️

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

Thirty-five years in and I still priced a job wrong last fall. Memorial piece for a family, granite, their father's hands resting on a book. I quoted by weight because that's how I buy the stone, so it made sense in my head at the time. Fifteen hundred for the material and rough shaping. Took me six weeks. The hands alone ate three of them. Every pass of the chisel I was thinking about how those were the hands that held their kids, and I couldn't rush it. By the time I'd finished the base and the lettering I'd logged close to two hundred hours. Two hundred hours for fifteen hundred dollars. Eight bucks an hour and that's before the shop lights were on. I told the daughter what it should have cost after she picked it up. She didn't care, she was happy with the piece, paid me extra out of nowhere because she said I undersold myself. That somehow made it worse. I keep a logbook of every job with hours against what I charged. That one's going to sit there for a long time reminding me that I priced labor like it was gravel.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

Started a big piece this week, two figures, and I've redrawn the same left hand about fourteen times. Charcoal, oil wash, charcoal again. It's ANATOMICALLY fine, like the fingers are where they go and the proportion is right. But it's dead. It's a diagram. I can draw a face and get all the feeling I need but a hand just sits there like a glove on a table. I know a guy who went to art school who would say it's because I never learned the underlying structure, and honestly maybe that's true. But I don't want a technically perfect hand. I want the one that looks like it's mid-sentence. The one that's about to reach for something. Took a photo of my own hand holding a pencil this morning, just to stare at it, and the weird thing is the photo is boring too. The hand is boring. It's what the hand is DOING that has the life in it. Think I might just paint it wrong on purpose and see if that's closer to right. Worst case I burn it, I've done that before. 😤

I got to sorting my scrap basket this morning. Lord, it was a mess. I mean a honest-to-goodness tangle of strips and triangles and odd-shaped pieces I told myself I'd use someday. And I got to noticing how I sort 'em, by color family first, then by what they came from. That little blue floral, that's from a dress my niece wore to Easter Sunday back in ought-eight. That mustard yellow, that's a man's shirt from the thrift that I unpicked for the good seams. I don't just sort fabric, I sort memories. And I thought, well that's me all over. Can't throw nothing away if it carried a story. My grandmother was the same way, she had a button tin that was more family history than any photo album. I told my daughter this morning, I said, I don't know if I'm a quilter who saves things or a saver who quilts. She just laughed and handed me her old jeans with a tear in the knee. "Here, Mama," she said. "Add me to the pile." I reckon that's what I'll do this afternoon. Turn her jeans into something she'll give her own girl one day. Y'all got a scrap basket that's really a memory basket too? Or am I just the old woman who can't let go? 🙂

Lady wanted a granite garden stone for her husband's memorial. Personal piece, carved text, took me eleven days off and on. I charged $2,600. Did the math on the drive home. That's $40 an hour before the stone, the carbide, the dust collector, the shop wear. A plumber gets triple that and doesn't have to stand in granite dust for a week. The thing is, she was happy. She said so twice. And I still felt like I should apologize for the number. Thirty years in and I can't get past that part. I know the drill. Raise your rates. It's a skill, not a hobby. I heard all of it. But the market for a carved memorial in this town is what it is, and nobody's lining up to pay more. So I keep pricing like I'm still the apprentice and not the one who's been doing it since Reagan was in office. Does anyone here actually get what a commission is worth, or are we all just guessing and hoping nobody blinks?

i've had this rubbermaid bin under my work table for like four years. t-shirts he wore that my mom couldn't throw away and neither could i. today i just took the scissors to one of them. a faded green one from a 5k he ran in 2008. felt like i was doing something wrong for the first ten minutes. now i'm gluing a strip of it into a piece about something else entirely and it finally makes sense being there. not as a memorial or whatever. just as a color and a texture that belongs in the thing. anyone else sit on materials forever before you can touch them? or is that just the hoarder gene

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

I've painted the same window in my apartment maybe forty times this year and I still don't feel like I've cracked it. Same light, same chipped frame, same view of the brick wall across the street that my landlord swears he'll repaint. When I tell people I'm a watercolor painter they think it's soft, gentle, forgiving, and then they watch me ruin the twelfth wash in a row because the paper dried too fast or the pigment settled wrong and suddenly it's not so cute anymore haha. It's not that I can't paint other things. I can. I do commissions, portraits, still lifes, whatever pays. But this window is the one I come back to at the end of the day when no one's watching, when I'm not trying to be impressive. There's something about how the light hits it at 4pm in the fall, this warm dusty gold that only lasts about twenty minutes, and every time I try to catch it I get three quarters of the way there and then lose it. My partner keeps telling me to just do a bigger version, like scale is the problem. It's not. The problem is I keep wanting it to be a photograph and it needs to be a memory instead. Anyway I had a good wash today, genuinely, one of the better ones. Thought I'd tell people who might understand the particular ache of chasing the same thing over and over and being kind of in love with the chase itself.

A student brought in a phone photo of her grandmother's kitchen and asked if she could paint from it. I said of course, but that's not the real question. The real question is why she wanted to. She said because the light in that room doesn't exist anymore, the afternoon sun through the window where her grandmother used to stand. So I told her to go find a room with the same kind of light, sit in it, and paint the memory anyway. The photo gives you the facts. It can't give you the hour you were there. We don't paint what we see. We paint what it was like to see it. That's the whole job and nobody teaches it anymore because you can't put it in a curriculum.

Had a show down in Montgomery last month and it set me straight about something. On Instagram, people be writing me all week about the small pieces, the little memory blocks, the ones that fit in a frame. Those sold out quick, no fuss. But the two big quilts I carried down there, the ones that took me months, the ones I prayed over at the machine? Those got all the looking and none of the buying. Gallery owner told me flat out that collectors want the statement piece for the wall, that's where the money is, and she's probably right for her side of things. But here's what I told her. The little ones are how somebody who never bought a quilt in their life gets brave enough to buy one. That's how the young folks start. That's how the next generation of collectors gets made. If I only made big ones for rich folks, I'd be feeding the same few mouths and starving everybody else. Funny part is, the two big ones did end up finding homes. Both ladies followed me on Instagram first, bought a small block two years ago, and worked their way up. So maybe the gallery's right about the wall and I'm right about the doorway. You got to have both.

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

Got the last of the granite for the memorial piece I'm working on. It was a beast to find the right color and veining. Took a few trips to the quarry, but this slab feels right. Now to get it back to the shop without breaking it.

Ten years I barely painted. Taught, mostly, watched students do in two years what took me six, and told myself it was fine. It wasn't the envy that got me, it was the absence. Your hands forget confidence before they forget technique. The muscle memory stays but the nerve goes, and that nerve is half the craft. People talk about coming back to painting like it's a decision you make one morning. It wasn't. It was months of making bad work on purpose, forgiving myself in advance, before anything decent came out. My first real painting after that stretch was a small pear on a blue cloth and I nearly cried finishing it, which is embarrassing to admit at 44. I think we should tell young painters that the worst thing that can happen to you is not failure, it's stopping and staying stopped. Failure keeps you in the room. Stopping moves you out of it and the rent back in is higher every year.

Okay so I took a commission to paint a memorial portrait and the whole week leading up to it I was like... this is a real person's actual loved one, what if I ruin the one thing they wanted to keep. I've done a million washes and landscapes and that same stupid window, but a face has to actually look like someone. That's a different kind of pressure. But I got the photos and it was this older man who apparently kept every bird feeder in his neighborhood full, and his daughter wrote me the sweetest email about him and I just... cried in my studio for a minute and then got to work. I did the underdrawing three times before the proportions felt right. Started the wash at like 10pm on a Tuesday and didn't look up until 3am. His eyes took me four attempts. The daughter wanted him mid-laugh and I must have painted and scraped that mouth area so many times the paper started to complain. It dried last night and I stood there just staring at it for a really long time. It's him. It's actually him, I got the laugh right. I sent her the photo and she said her mom cried, and then I cried again, and honestly I think this is the most scared I've ever been while working and also the most right it's ever felt. I've been so worried that going full-time meant I'd end up just grinding out work I don't care about. But this one mattered. That's the whole point right??

Went back this morning to the old house on the corner near Sunday market. The one with the chajja that's been drooping for years. The demolition guys were already there, and the front wall is gone since last week. I sat across the road with my little stool and drew the gap where the drawing room used to be, the staircase just hanging there in open air. Thing is, I've painted that house maybe six times over the last two years. Every time meaning to catch it before this exact morning. And when it finally happened I almost turned around and went home because it felt like standing at someone's funeral with a sketchbook. But I forced myself to sit. Twenty minutes. The plaster dust kept drifting over my palette. There's something strange about drawing a thing while it's actively becoming a memory. The sketch isn't even good, honestly. But I'm glad I did it instead of driving away. I think that's the whole practice some days, just showing up even when it hurts to look.

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

I have this rag I wipe pastel dust off my fingers with. It used to be a t-shirt I wore in my office job, before I quit. Every portrait I've ever done has left a bit of itself on it, layers of pigment so thick in places it's more like a painting than a rag. My partner keeps offering to throw it in the wash and I keep saying no, and I can't really explain why. It's not sentimental, it's not like I hold onto a shirt for the memories. It's just that the color buildup is a record. I can look at it and see the last two years of faces, all smeared together into one brownish mess that's somehow more honest than the finished pieces. Today I held it up to the light and there was a patch of that exact pink I mixed eleven times for one portrait and never got right. The rag got it in the end. Maybe I should frame the rag instead of the drawings.

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.